IFFR 2008

Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker

The famous choreographer developed her own creation further with purely cinematographic means. The result is not only a perfectly crafted dance film, but of such cinematographic quality that it easily overshadows most ‘real’ films.

Cinema Regained: Pièce Unique

Achterland

Hélio Oiticica

For this meditation on the pitfalls of appetite and greed, the artist refers to Agrippina, the widowed Roman aristocrat who wanted the blood of the Caesars, translated to the New York of now, promenading on the arm of a pimp.

Agrippina é Roma-Manhattan

Marcel Duchamp

This characteristically dada film by Marcel Duchamp consists of a series of visual and verbal puns with nonsense phrases inscribed around rotating spiral patterns, creating an almost hypnotic effect.

Anémic cinéma

Peter Sellars

Mostly filmed in the vicinity of Wall Street, opera producer Peter Sellars’ non-spoken movie is very loosely based on the 1919 German Expressionist landmark film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. With Mikhail Baryshnikov as Cesar the somnambulist.

The Cabinet of Dr. Ramirez

Jean Genet

Because of its explicit homosexual content, Un chant d'amour was long banned and was also disowned by Genet later in his life. In a French prison a guard takes voyeuristic pleasure in observing the prisoners’ masturbatory acts.

Un chant d'amour

Samuel Beckett

For the shooting of his only venture into the medium of cinema, famous writer Samuel Beckett made his only trip to America and offered Buster Keaton his very last role. 'To be is to be perceived' is the motto of the film.

Film

Leonard Kastle

In a reaction to <strong>Bonnie &amp; Clyde </strong>(1967), Kastle wanted to craft a crime movie that avoided all Hollywood glamour. His fans have included Michelangelo Antonioni and François Truffaut.

The Honeymoon Killers

Forugh Farrokhzad

A 'poetic treatment of leprosy', but also a factual documentary by one of Iran's most venerated modern poets, a woman whose writing still permeates Iranian culture and cinema (Kiarostami, Mahmalbaf).

The House is Black

Marcel Mariën

Blasphemous or surrealist? The Belgian equivalent to Bunuel’s L’Age d’Or is a Freudian erotic, highly amusing parody on the Church, a film that caused a scandal and for decades could only be shown in clandestine settings.

L'imitation du cinéma

Helen Levitt

In the Street is considered one of the first American experimental films: a succession of compact, silent dramas shot in East Harlem, a territory untouched by modernism, far from Rockefeller Center.

In the Street

Mário Peixoto

The most legendary silent film in Brazilian history about three shipwrecked people adrift in a small boat on the open sea.

The most legendary and unseen silent film in Brazilian history evokes the theme of three shipwrecked people, two women and a man adrift in a small boat on the open sea. The theme  is stated in its title: the limits faced by man in the struggle for existence. Peixoto’s technique was influenced by the legacy of French avant-garde films.

Limite

Edward Ruscha

A story about a curious day in the life of an auto mechanic with artist Jim Ganzer and actress Michelle Phillips. Filmed by art icon Ed Ruscha.

Miracle

Saul Bass

Quiet, haunting, beautiful Phase IV is an intriguing, and largely overlooked, science-fiction masterwork centred on the latent destructive power of the insect world and humanity’s inherent vulnerability in the face of catastrophic change.

Phase IV

David Byrne

This sunny, odd musical by the lead singer of Talking Heads takes an outside-looking-in glance at Texas, based on stories found in supermarket tabloids. The whole thing is an offbeat mix of 'funny old world' slices of life and pop videos.

True Stories

Peter Lorre

A scientist murders his fiancée during World War II. He soon finds himself unable to resist killing again and again after the war. Debts must be paid… The only German film that looked the moral truth in the eye.

Der Verlorene

Barbara Loden

This unhappy anti-<strong>Bonnie &amp; Clyde </strong>road movie (with the director in the lead role), is the most overlooked example of independent feminist cinema. A moving portrait of a damaged, alienated woman.

Wanda

Yukio Mishima

Yûkoku is an extremely rare and historic piece, not only for proving that Japan’s foremost twentieth century author was also in fact a film maker, but because the events portrayed in it were an omen for Yukio Mishima’s suicide a few years later.

IFFR 2025
30 Jan – 9 Feb 2025